For years, integration has been viewed as the sidekick to application development—important but not the leading player. That has changed with the rise of digital businesses whose success is based on the strength of their interactions across communities—from internal teams to partner ecosystems, customers, industry groups, and government entities, among others.

John Rymer, Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst, captured this new reality in his keynote presentation at WSO2Con US 2018 where he observed, “Modern apps are distributed, meaning integration must now be built in, not bolted on.”

In other words, integration needs to move from being a sidekick to co-starring with app development in driving digital business innovation.

WSO2 Addresses Today’s Integration Gap

The central role of integration in software projects means that integration has to be as agile as app delivery. However, while code development has shifted to agile, the same can’t be said for integration, which is still trapped in a siloed, waterfall mentality. To address this challenge, we are helping enterprises transform into “integration agile” organizations.

Integration agile is an integration practice that favors short, continuous, iterative integration releases—similar in nature to agile code development. The approach is based upon organization, architecture, and methodology that enable multiple DevOps teams to code both applications and their integrations. The result speeds integration releases, minimizes organizational IT silos, and enables enterprises to respond rapidly to changing market and business demands.

The approach is codified in the WSO2 Integration Agile Platform. First introduced in July 2018, it offers a cohesive architecture along with the components and processes needed to help simplify and unify complex integration projects. Architected on a common code base of open source technologies, the cloud native WSO2 Integration Agile Platform features seamlessly integrated functionality for full lifecycle API creation and management, enterprise integration, identity and access management (IAM), and event stream processing.

WSO2 Advances Integration Agile Platform with Fall 2018 Release

We are now advancing the ability of enterprises to become integration agile with the Fall 2018 Release of our WSO2 Integration Agile Platform—addressing people and processes as well as enabling technologies. This newest release of our platform introduces:

New WSO2 Integration Agile Consulting services and resources for transforming IT organizations’ development and integration silos into fully Integration Agile teams

Unified Analytics:WSO2 Stream Processor is an open source, cloud-native, and lightweight stream processing product that captures, analyzes, processes and acts on events using streaming SQL queries in real time. With the Fall 2018 Release, it adds out-of-the-box analytics for WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, WSO2 API Manager, and WSO2 Identity Server. Now, customers can apply rich analytics and alerting capabilities across the WSO2 products to obtain a holistic view of integration projects with large-scale instance volumes across a range of business use cases. WSO2 Stream Processor also introduces an industry first with the ability to calculate long-running, real-time aggregations with milliseconds accuracy—from seconds up to years—even when events arrive out of order. Users no longer face the complexity of adding specialized storage for big data to obtain this functionality.

Adaptive Authentication:WSO2 Identity Server is a uniquely extensible, open source IAM product featuring adaptive and strong authentication, which helps bridge identity protocols and is optimized for identity federation and single sign-on (SSO) across on-premises and cloud environments. The Fall 2018 Release of WSO2 Identity Server addresses the fact that authentication options available for any given application cannot be predetermined by enabling organizations to dynamically determine authentication at runtime without impacting usability. The new script-based adaptive authentication functionality gives identity administrators the flexibility to control how they authenticate users into their organization’s apps, integrate with external identity providers, and handle token transformation as required by the apps. Other new features include:

Basic-level support for User-Managed Access (UMA), an OAuth-based access management protocol, which facilitates integration by letting users register their resources and define policies for accessing them using APIs.

Simplified integration with Microsoft Office 365 by letting enterprises rely on WSO2 Identity Server to act as the identity provider and handle synchronization with Microsoft Cloud.

Integration Agile Consulting, Methodology and Architecture: We’ve taken a decade-plus of experience working on integration and digital transformation projects to develop the WSO2 Maturity Model for Agility. With the Fall 2018 Release of the WSO2 Integration Agile Platform, we’re rolling out new WSO2 Integration Agile Consulting services that apply this model to help executives take a pragmatic approach to accelerating their IT organizations’ journey toward integration agility. These include a range of assessment, planning and implementation services that are tailored to each customer’s current state, goals and desired outcomes. The services are complemented by two new reference documents available for download:

WSO2 Methodology for Agility is a prescriptive approach to assist digitally driven organizations in becoming integration agile by focusing on their people, processes and technology.

Many enterprises are now moving to agile digital business models that connect people, processes, and information to deliver new products and services. With our expanded WSO2 Integration Agile Platform, we are empowering these organizations to transform their teams, architectures and methodologies to speed their integration releases—and make integration and code development co-stars in accelerating innovation.